Your boss is not your mother, father, therapist or friend.
So when one senior executive at a technology company told her staff, “I’m not your mum,” she was right.
I couldn’t help a chuckle as I read the full story.
It sounded to me like she was trying to light a fire under her employees—and I too have had to do something similar a few times, typically during organizational turnarounds.
Just as I’ve had to sack a few people.
When you’re revamping the performance, talent, culture and entrenched ways of working in a team/organization, some incumbent employees may just not fit the bill, and any leader worth their salt must address the issue unequivocally.
This is something managers at all levels must not shy away from.
If an individual has been managed effectively, given appropriate support, encouragement and constructive feedback, and adequate time and opportunity to prove themself, all to no avail, then you must take further action.
Don’t compromise your high standards.
I’ve often found that such short-term compromises, made several times, eventually lead to the need for an organizational transformation in the long-term.
I’ve also found that as a leader, it’s far more effective to light the fire inside people.
Sometimes this calls for tough love.
“Light the fire in your employees, not under them”
And that’s probably what made me chuckle at the senior executive’s words: I recognized her desire and intent to galvanize and engage her staff.
But there’s a fine line between tough love leadership and getting employee engagement completely wrong—a lesson some managers only learn the hard way.
Engagement is what sustains the psychological contract between employees and the organization. It is the elixir that propels individuals to give that extra ten to fifteen percent discretionary effort entirely of their own free will.
Our tech executive would have been much better off to balance the toughness in her approach with showing some love. This requires empathy.
Empathy is a critical constituent of leadership effectiveness (and emotional intelligence).
It means identifying with individuals; listening to them actively, with your ears, your eyes, your heart, as well as your behaviour, so you can know and understand them better as human beings—their feelings, thoughts, needs, challenges, points of view, what makes them tick, and how you as their boss can touch the hungry spirit of human potential in them.
And then following through with meaningful action and support that continually feed that spirit, to boost their performance, expand their growth and amplify their contribution to the organization’s success—and yours, too.
“Employee engagement feeds the spirit of human potential”
A leadership style that lacks empathy will likely just appease the most basic yearnings of the human spirit embodied as a worker, e.g., the existential, physiological or safety needs of earning a living to survive, and feeling a bit of security for continued subsistence from having a job.
Employees in such jobs or work environments rarely ever recognize or reveal their true capabilities.
They work for pay and just do enough to not get fired.
They’re not inspired, excited, enthused or energized. And the organization will likely never reap the benefits of their full potential.
A leadership approach imbued with empathy builds strong interpersonal connections, good chemistry and a healthier workplace culture.
Because it increases goodwill, reinforces and deepens trust and significantly improves communication and alignment.
Employees in such teams or organizations typically have a greater sense of self-worth and belonging; in large part because of these stimulus factors which facilitate a work environment where they feel valued and appreciated.
“Leadership without empathy is not really ‘leadership’”
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to work for a boss who cultivates this sort of organizational climate, you’ll understand how it fulfils the innate desire of the human spirit to be part of something meaningful.
Bosses like this stoke the fire in our belly.
They enable us to gain more from our work than the salary we are paid. And work becomes much more than “work”, more than the daily grind; we’re stimulated and hungry for more, motivated to do and show our best.
That spark of motivation is one of the key driving forces of employee sentiment and behaviour, whether it is triggered by rewards and recognition, fear of losing the job or any medium in-between.
I guess it’s obvious which medium our tech executive chose.
It must also be obvious what the likely outcome of her leadership approach will be. I suspect it won’t include a team of happy and engaged employees.
Managing employees in a way that gets the most from them, draws out their top game and fuels their development requires good sense in the subject of human motivation.
Sadly, too few bosses, managers, leaders, call them what you will, are trained or clued-in on this; like that tech executive.
Yet the organization that put her in that role without ensuring her leadership proficiency is as much to blame as the executive herself, if not more so.
